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The BitBoards so far have been astoundingly accurate at producing moves. But even after the moves have been produced they have to be fully validated. Take for instance, a bishop in the middle of the board. The number of potential moves for the bishop is 13 or so, but the number of valid moves, unless no spots are blocked, is much less. Further performing friendly versus non-friendly extension is extremely importan since you can’t move into a friendly position, but you can move into the first occuring non-friendly position (capturing). I’ve found some interesting transformations here, but once I can more fully validate them I’ll start to post their intricacies.

Even more frustrating are the pawns. Pawns are capable of special feats when in their original file (forward by 2), they are allowed capturing moves that are different from their standard movement rules, and they are also allowed the ability to capture en-passant. Deciding where and how to implement these extra conditions is very important. Remember the original blocking square algorithm I implemented for removing invalid moves consisted of:

uint myPieces =…; uint notMine = ~myPieces; uint validMoves = moves & notMine;

This has to be expanded a bit, since notMine actually points to all empty and enemy squares. What we need now is a blocking region for all enemy squares (which we have to store anyway, since eventually the board swaps sides and enemy and friendly are reversed). The valid moves become something like:

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Recently, I attended the Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) Attendee Party (thanks, Sean!) at the wonderful Boeing Museum of Flight , in Seattle, with my partner Dave Morehouse.

Our Mission
Find, gather requirements for, and validate our social software plans for what we stiltingly and half-jokingly refer to as “Microsoft.community” with a subset of our target customers: Chinese- and Japanese-speaking MVPs; our most likely early adopters in China and Japan. I invited and we were graciously accompanied by my college buddy, Jumi, who hails from Tokyo, as well as a colleague from China, who is the Program Manager on our extended team, at Microsoft’s Advanced Technology Center, in Beijing.

Our Findings
One of the services we are planning to deploy (soon) as part of our integrated service offerings is a social bookmarking service, codenamed “Tagspace “. Toward the end of the night, Jumi and I engaged in a colorful and informative conversation with three young Japanese MVPs, an exchange which later blossomed into a very hopeful theory.

Big in Japan
I xclaim that Japanese culture–a culture in which building concrete group consensus with as little conflict as possible is profoundly important–inclines the Japanese to embrace and value the product of Social Bookmarking (aka, Tagging) on the Web more completely and permanently more than any other culture. This is a UNTESTED theory.

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In coordination with Taylor Development, which among other things owns an undeveloped 60 acre parcel of land that is zoned Manufacturing Park (MP) along Union Hill road in Southeast Redmond (see Redmond zoning map here  and Live.com Map here ), City Staff has presented the Redmond Planning Commission , of which I am a presiding member, with a proposal to expand the list of permitted uses in Redmond’s Manufacturing Park (MP) zone to include “Wholesale/Retail Membership” stores. In other words, they propose to enable folks like Mr. Paul Taylor with the flexibility to build a Costco or Sam’s Club-type store out by the UPS distribution center, east of Target and Mervyns, in SE Redmond. To accommodate this, Redmond City Staff has proposed that we allow such uses in all the MP zone in SE Redmond. throughout the City of Redmond.

Correction, 5/8/2007: I have been informed that the proposed regulatory ammendments to permitted uses in the MP zone would limit wholesale-retail stores to the MP area in Southeast Redmond only.

What do you think? If you live in or near Redmond and especially if you commute through or live in or near to Southeast Redmond near a Manufacturing Park Zone here (to/from Redmond via Avondale Road, Redmond-Fall City Road, Willows Road, or other), I’d like to hear what you think about this proposal. I am one of the Planning Commissioners who will soon vote on whether or not (and why) the City Council should approve this proposed change. Your opinion matters to me. But more importantly, your opinion matters to your fellow residents and elected officials. As such, I encourage you to comment, on public record, by emailing your thoughts to Sarah Stiteler , with the City of Redmond. I’m sure that Sarah can also provide you with the full Technical Committee Report, which I can’t find on the City Web Site (argh!), that outlines why City Staff believes this proposed change to be viable, appropriate, and legal.

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I learned my lesson with Fable, so I’ll try desperately not to start a flame war of any sort here. Up front, I’m giving the game a definite thumbs up. If you are the kind of person that likes to flame, then leave now knowing that I’ve given your favorite thing my personal approval.

Let’s start with the good. The campaign and story is pretty nice. The cinematic effect is definitely there, something I don’t approve of in games most of the time. In this case the cinematics were rather short and they appear to have answered all of the questions from the first Halo, about what in the hell is actually going on in this universe. Don’t expect a major story though, in all there is about 30 minutes of video (maybe someone will time that eventually). It appears in most cases that the actual game engine was used to produce cinematic sequences. I’m a huge advocate of this process, since it generally reduces the size of the game even if it doesn’t allow for as much eye candy through complex, non real-time, shaders.

Playing from both sides of the story is another great feature even if the movement features are identical between the arbiter and the master chief. Of course you get to use all of the weapons no matter which side you are. A couple of the new weapons are even pretty nice and if you add dual wielding then you can really do some drastic damage. Getting used to the new weapons is a short process, but for the most part, just realize everything is going to take a good amount of shots in order to take down. Nearly every enemy has energy shields now, so making use of a good pairing of weapons is almost always required (for a good run-down of the weapons, head over to GameFAQs where someone has posted a huge review of all of the weapons, relative damage, recommended threat ranges, etc…)

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A few weeks ago, ScottGu blogged about the ASP.NET MVC Framework roadmap…    I am happy to announce that we have taken the next step on that roadmap with the availability of the ASP.NET MVC Framework update. 

ASP.NET MVC Preview 2

The ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 release contains the latest version of the ASP.NET MVC framework and related Visual Studio tools support.

In this release we have incorporated a ton of feedback, added some new features and enhanced the tooling support!

Check it out at http://asp.net/mvc

Find some great video overviews of the new features.

Walk through t

he MVC Quickstarts and use the MVC forums to ask questions and get help! 

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/03/05/asp-net-mvc-preview-2.aspx

There was a lot of discussion about my previous posts here and here. My point is that the internet is a stable platform. Its a utility. Its evolved to the point where you can count on it and develop applications for it without much fear that its going to change.

What confirms my point is that with all the talk of a possible or existing recession, not a single mention is ever made about how increases in productivity from technology will pull us through. That is counter to the recessions of the past 25 years. Whether it was the early 80s, the 90’s or even the post bubble , economists and others pointed to technology as a catalyst to productivity that would help pull us out of our economic doldrums.

When there were boomtimes , as we saw from about 91 to 2000, technology was given the lions’ share of the credit.

So where are the claims of further productivity enhancements from technology ? They are no where that I can find.

In fact, we can start to make arguments to the contrary. That technology and in particular social network and video sites can be a hindrance to productivity in the workplace.

Further arguments can be made that the MSFT YHOO potential merger is further evidence that the technology industry is maturing.

It is what it is.

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http://www.blogmaverick.com/2008/02/10/the-internet-is-officially-dead-and-boring-its-the-economy-stupi/

I’m usually a lurker here, but I thought LtU readers might be interested in a post on my blog , looking back on 10 years of my book Purely Functional Data Structures (published in 1998).

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2665

Wow - check it out… Aptana (the “other” IDE for web development) just got support for the Microsoft Ajax library.  The Microsoft Ajax Library is that the core of ASP.NET AJAX, but does not require any Microsoft software on the server of client.  And now, not even in the IDE. 

 

 

Hanselman has all the details, including the com.ajax.ms.3.5.21022.8.jar that you just drop into Aptana’s plug in directory. 

Softwre Development for small and middle size companies. World-class software applications.
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http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/02/14/aptana-gets-microsoft-ajax-library-support.aspx

Say you’ve just installed some assemblies from a third party and now you’re seeing a MissingMethodException, MissingFieldException, or TypeLoadException (during the run of an application using those assemblies). Below are the common causes.

Loading failures
First, check for assembly binding failures by getting the Fusion log. Look for the assembly containing that method/field/type or assemblies containing types referenced by it. If an assembly failed to load, use the instructions at the same link to help resolve that issue.

Unexpected assembly version loaded
But, if that’s not the problem, turn on the Fusion log for everything - not just failures - and check to see if the wrong version of those assemblies is being loaded. Look at the display names requested. Are any requesting outdated versions, even after policy has been applied (see further down in the log for the post-policy display name)? If so, you may want to recompile part of your app so that it has current references.

Loaded from unexpected path
If that doesn’t help, run filever.exe on the file at the path it was loaded from. You can get that from the loaded modules list in a debugger. It’s also the last path listed in the Fusion log, for a successful log (if it’s in the GAC, no path is listed). Make sure it is the same path as you would expect.

Not in this version of the assembly
Next, run ildasm.exe on the file at the path it was loaded from at runtime. Make sure that the method/field/type is there and is defined how you would expect it. Maybe the file has changed, adding or removing methods or the like, but the assembly version and location have stayed the same.

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Today, I took a much needed break to attend a Microsoft Research talk by Paul Dietz , who is a scientist at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab (MERL ).

In describing one of his inventions, a system that automagically pings your waitress when your glass is half empty, Paul described RFID tags as a “passive, non-interactive component”. He then proceeded to describe how he and his associates at MERL have figured out how to enable two devices to communicate using low cost LED lights , at hundreds of bits per second. But I’ll get back to that, in a second.

Suddently, it hit me: a quick and simple way to describe microformats to my friends and colleagues!

A microformat serves the same function on the Web as an RFID tag in a Walmart warehouse ! Microformats are descriptive but passive. They just sit out there and wait to be discovered by an interested agent. They are small and easy to miss, unless you’re looking for them. Microformats, like RFID tags, talk to everyone.

What is a microformat? A microformat is an RFID tag for Web pages. Do you see any problems with this analogy?

Now, back to LEDs and Paul Dietz… I invite you to chew on this for a second:

LED a + LED b = communication medium

Think about the hundreds of LED lights that you encounter on a daily basis: on your keychain, desktop, dashboard, keyboard , remote control, auto, kitchen appliances, telephone, TV, computer, and even your kids. Paul Dietz is not just another Talking Head.

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